Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival Read online

  Sometimes politicians seemed to occupy a different planet. Nine days into his job as reconstruction minister – a post that was meant to coordinate rebuilding efforts – Ryu Matsumoto resigned after being caught on video berating a governor of one of the devastated prefectures. The governor’s ‘crime’ was to have turned up for a meeting a few minutes late. Matsumoto jabbed his finger at the poor man, thousands of whose citizens had been swept away by the tsunami, telling him such a breach of etiquette was unacceptable. His supreme insensitivity summed up for many all that was wrong with a ruling elite that had lost touch with reality. Six months after waves crashed into the northeast coast, Kan’s government too had crumpled.

  The Democratic Party’s third and final prime minister was Yoshihiko Noda, a man who hardly inspired the highest expectations by likening his role as leader of Japan to that of a bus driver. To be fair, Noda did get a few things done. His government passed supplementary budgets, bringing to more than $200 billion the amount set aside to rebuild Tohoku. It also began tentative talks, very controversial among protectionist lobby groups at home, on joining the Trans Pacific Partnership, a high-level free trade agreement of which the US is a prospective member. Just as potentially far-reaching was the passage of legislation to double sales tax by 2015 in what some saw as the first serious attempt to tackle the debt problem in years. In his typically earthy language, Noda had warned that European-style defaults of the type seen in Greece were ‘not a fire on the other side of the river’. Still, raising taxes was hardly a vote-winner. Even some economists thought it was premature, more likely to tip the economy into yet another recession than to repair the nation’s financial health. Passage of the bill was secured by a promise to hold an early general election, which went ahead at the end of 2012. The Democratic Party duly lost, handing back power to the Liberal Democrats after only three years in the wilderness. Noda’s bus had careered over the precipice.

  • • •

  It was not only the Democratic Party that had disappointed. A deeper dissatisfaction had set in with the political class in general. The national response to the tsunami seemed to crystallize an idea that had been forming for decades. ‘Each individual Japanese showed extraordinary strength, but as a collective unit I think we’ve been in a mess,’ Toshiaki Miura, the commentator at the Asahi newspaper, told me. A country we often think of as strong collectively but weak individually had shown itself to be the exact reverse, he said. Japan, it turned out, was a nation of strong individuals and a weak state. I thought of what my friend Shijuro Ogata had often told me. ‘Japan is a country of good soldiers but poor commanders.’ Sawako Shirahase, a sociologist at Tokyo University, had arrived at a similar conclusion. ‘It’s very strange,’ she said of the carousel of forgettable prime ministers. ‘Japanese society used to be characterized as very top down. But we have learned that we can survive without a leader.’

  There were multiple ways in which Japanese people were learning how to ‘live without a leader’ or, to put it another way, to organize themselves. You could call it the slow, but steady, formation of a civil society in a country whose people had a reputation, not entirely undeserved, for being passive and too respectful of hierarchy. It was also recognition of real changes. Japan Inc no longer looked after people as it once had. More Japanese were in casual work with no lifetime job prospects. More were living on the margins of a society that had regarded itself as uniquely egalitarian among advanced nations. Hama said that even the language had changed. She pointed to Hatoyama’s inauguration speech back in 2009 when he had referred to the electorate as shimin, or ‘citizens’, in the style of the French Revolution, not the word that was usually used – kokumin, in her translation, ‘people who belong to their country’, or shain, ‘people who belong to the company’. Citizens belonged to no one. Civil society was, she said, slowly ‘emerging from the ranks of subjects and salarymen’.

  In many walks of life, there were signs of people taking matters a little more into their own hands. One was the volunteer sector. Progress since the Kobe earthquake of 1995 – the so-called ‘Year One of the Volunteer Age’ – was palpable. In January 1995, more than a million volunteers had rushed spontaneously to the stricken city to help. The upsurge in popular support took the country by surprise. Volunteers were widely praised for their show of civic responsibility and most were warmly welcomed in Kobe itself. Many of them, though, were not properly organized. A few who arrived at the earthquake zone without food or any idea of where they might sleep were characterized as meiwaku borantia, ‘nuisance volunteers’.4 Kobe marked the stirrings of a new spirit of social solidarity and collective action, but for the most part it was amateurish. By the time of Japan’s next huge disaster in 2011 it was very different. On the eve of the tsunami, there were at least 40,0005 registered non-profit organizations in the country. The sector was more professional, better financed and better coordinated. Some of the volunteer organizations had financial backing from big business through widespread ‘corporate responsibility’ programmes. When disaster struck, volunteers were rapidly dispatched to the stricken coast to distribute food, medical care and counselling. Private businesses sent thousands of their own employees, both as humanitarian volunteers and as logistical help to get factories up and running again. Manufacturing supply chains were restored, sometimes at almost miraculous speed, over the ensuing weeks and months.

  The government made efforts to coordinate these groups, within days of the disaster appointing a well-known former activist, Kiyomi Tsujimoto, co-founder of the Peace Boat group, as prime ministerial aide in charge of disaster volunteering. Her appointment won praise, though in practice her role wasn’t always clear. In the worst affected parts of the country, it was common to hear the government bureaucracy roundly lambasted while volunteers were praised. Typical was the comment of Shigemitsu Hatakeyama, an oyster fisherman nearly drowned by the tsunami in the town of Kesennuma in Miyagi prefecture. ‘Since the earthquake, I haven’t got a single thing from the government,’ he told me contemptuously. ‘It was the volunteers who gave us food.’ It was volunteers, too, he said, who had provided him with concrete advice about how to restart his devastated oyster business. He planned to build tourist accommodation and to set up a little restaurant where visitors could enjoy his Miyagi oysters fresh out of the sea. Others talked of the friends they had made among volunteers who had streamed to Tohoku, whether to refurbish buildings, sort through debris or salvage waterlogged possessions. An academic who has studied the Japanese voluntary sector concluded that, in the years since Kobe, it had ‘reached a new kind of professionalism, organisation, social legitimacy and institutionalisation’.6

  Keiko Kiyama, secretary-general of Japan Emergency NGOs, which had operated in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, and which organized volunteers to Tohoku, agreed there had been a lot of improvement since Kobe. But Japan’s volunteer sector, she told me, still hadn’t caught up with its counterparts in the US and Europe. ‘Even now, I feel that civil society is not strong enough. I feel that we Japanese are fine working individually or in a small group, but we are not strong on organizational management. We need to be able to kill small differences for the bigger objective. We are not so good at coming to one big idea.’ Kiyama didn’t think the government knew how to handle the upsurge in volunteers. Bureaucracy was sometimes stifling, she said, and government departments were reluctant to let go. They found it hard to deal with proposals outside their immediate bureaucratic experience, such as those coming from volunteer groups that wanted to provide badly needed psychological counselling to disaster victims. An official from Give2Asia, a volunteer group, told me a story that seemed to back up Kiyama’s impression of a rules-bound bureaucracy jealously guarding its turf. Some groups had been told that, for the sake of fairness, they had to distribute exactly the same items to all recipients. ‘They had to provide 70,000 of every item, the exact same brand and everything,’ the Give2Asia official said.
‘We heard of one group that brought 197 bananas [to an evacuation centre], but there were 199 people so they refused to take the shipment – because there wasn’t enough for everyone.’7

  Such obstacles aside, Miura of the Asahi said that something had definitely changed. For months after the tsunami, one of his friends, a law school graduate, volunteered to go to Tohoku every weekend, travelling north under his own steam, taking supplies and helping local communities. ‘It’s now quite natural for the best and brightest people to think that way and do volunteer work. This is very, very new,’ Miura said. I too was impressed by the number of volunteers I saw in Tohoku, not only in the days immediately following the tsunami, but for months after. Driving through devastated coastal towns, one frequently came across a school baseball team from Hiroshima or a clutch of salarymen from Mitsubishi, digging out an inundated rice field or carefully sorting through photograph albums salvaged from flooded houses. The Self Defence Forces were everywhere too, searching for the bodies of the dead and bringing food for the living. In one town, they had set up a mobile communal bath in a car park under a military green tarpaulin, so that tsunami survivors could enjoy their all-important bathing ritual. ‘I do kind of believe that a new spirit and new ideas are emerging in many parts of society,’ Miura said of the changes he detected after the tsunami. ‘This crisis I believe has sown the seeds of new thinking. Although we have not yet come up with any new ideology or new types of leaders, people have begun to think differently.’

  It would be rash to claim that a single event, even one as traumatic as the March 2011 tsunami, could change society overnight. More likely, it illuminated changes that had been going on for many years. Certainly, as Japan has adjusted to much slower levels of economic growth, there were many ways in which individuals and groups of individuals had sought to become more actively engaged. I had seen, for example, how small towns and villages, for example in Oita prefecture in southern Kyushu, had come together to look after their old people. They organized a roster of home visits and put on activities, such as calligraphy or local history classes, for the older members of their community. The creation of a vibrant civil society was partly a matter of changing customs and partly a matter of legislation, said Jeff Kingston, a long-time scholar of Japan. In his book Japan’s Quiet Transformation, he documented the way in which laws, and with them attitudes, had been slowly shifting, extending and invigorating what he characterized as a ‘stunted’ civil society. ‘Ordinary citizens are demanding a more democratic society marked by more transparent governance, more public participation and oversight, and greater accountability based on the rule of law.’8

  One area of significant progress, he said, had been information, the public’s right to know. Since the 1990s, there had been an accelerating push for government disclosure. Pressure for transparency had gone all the way back to at least the 1960s, when citizens’ groups demanded, mostly unsuccessfully, information about pesticide use, food additives and pharmaceutical side effects. In 1985, families of the more than 520 people who had died in the country’s deadliest air crash were driven to use the US Freedom of Information Act to find out what had happened, exposing the inadequacy of Japan’s own laws. Grassroots groups eventually forced local prefectural governments to enact information disclosure ordinances. By 1996, the year after Kobe, all forty-seven prefectures had passed such legislation. Citizens were quick to use their new-found powers to expose wrongdoing, including bureaucrats’ fake travel expense claims and improbably large entertainment allowances. In one case, officials had claimed dozens of journeys on a bullet train line that was not even in operation.

  The courts became more supportive of citizens’ demands for the right to know. In 2001, after years of pressure, a national information disclosure bill was finally enacted. Kingston said that public scepticism over the Fukushima nuclear disaster showed how far things had come. People were in no mood to be fobbed off by bland official assurances or pre-cooked ‘town hall meetings’. They would not accept, as they once might have done, government sleights of hand, such as the attempt to render school playgrounds ‘safe’ by the dishonest manoeuvre of simply raising the limit of acceptable levels of radiation. Nor would they tolerate a government that they judged to have been dishonest and incompetent in its handling of the disaster. In the end, such public pressure toppled the government and yielded an independent parliamentary inquiry into the nuclear crisis. There were public hearings with archived testimony and widespread dissemination of findings over the internet, including the release (eventually) of video tapes showing scenes inside the reactors as the nuclear crisis was unfolding. ‘Despite some shortcomings, it marked a milestone in transparency,’ Kingston said.9

  There were many other examples of a more active citizenry. Some, such as the installation of lay judges in criminal trials, were the initiative of the government. Others, such as opposition to the introduction of a state identification system, were the result of citizens pushing back against what they considered an overbearing state. Launched in 2002, the Juki Net proposed to collect a database of every citizen, listing their name, age, sex, date of birth, place of residency, together with an eleven-digit identification number. Given the ordered nature of Japanese society and the well-established family registry, dating back to at least 1872, one might not have expected the Juki Net to have provoked much alarm. Citizens groups, however, reacted furiously, pursuing no fewer than thirty-five lawsuits against the scheme. Yoshiaki Takashi, a retired trading company employee, spoke for many when he told me, ‘The government has given a number to human beings as if we were animals or industrial products. I am furious at the men who want to know my private data when they have no business with such things.’10

  During the tsunami, citizen journalists had also blazed a trail. Not only had they used new media to spread information about what was going on, many had done reporting shunned by the more established media. Newspapers had pulled their reporters out of areas contaminated with radiation en masse, but freelance journalists moved in to fill the gap. Reports from foreign media or experts that contradicted the official line were quickly translated and disseminated over the internet. Some journalists streamed press conferences live, bypassing the mainstream media, which often gave an anodyne account of proceedings. An academic study into the impact of social media during the disaster found ‘evidence that the social media activities of these rogue journalists/translators emboldened and empowered other reporters to pose more challenging questions’.11

  Toshiki Senoue, my photographer friend, spent weeks on end in the no-go zone around Fukushima, documenting what had happened to the abandoned towns and villages in the shadow of the nuclear plant. He had found a trail into the exclusion zone, away from the strictly controlled checkpoints, that enabled him to enter and leave the area undetected. He took photographs and detailed notes and planned to publish a book so that people would know what had gone on inside a nuclear disaster zone that was officially out of bounds to the media. On one occasion he was detained by police and warned it was illegal for him to be in the area. Toshiki was having none of it. ‘The government is not going to tell me where I can and cannot go in my own country,’ he told me. By this time, at least, he had got hold of a Geiger counter.

  16

  After the Tsunami

  Seizaburo Sato, who went on to be a carpenter and a volunteer fireman, was born in Iwate prefecture in 1929. He remembered learning as a teenager how to fight with a sharpened bamboo stick in case the Americans invaded. Towards the end of the war, US planes would fly low over the fields, strafing them with bullets. All he could do was hide. Once, he remembered, he squatted behind a tiny trunk as a plane roared above him. When Japan surrendered, the planes came back. This time they dropped barrels containing clothes and medicine. There was no transport in those days, Sato said, so he never got to the barrels in time. They always seemed to land on some distant hillside. ‘We’d lost the war, so there were food shortag
es and no jobs,’ he recalled of those years after defeat. ‘Back then they needed carpenters, wall plasterers. Those people could get work.’1 Sato’s parents sent him away on an apprenticeship to Sendai, then, as now, the ‘capital’ of the north. He stayed for four years, receiving no salary, just pocket money – enough to buy the occasional movie ticket. In Sendai, the American soldiers used to thunder by in trucks. Once he went to a baseball match to see them play. ‘That’s when I drank my first Coca Cola.’ He was terrified of girls in those days. Besides, it wasn’t thought proper to talk to them in public. The only ones he could relax around were the ‘shampoo girls’ who worked in the barber shops. In his early twenties, he moved back to his home town in Iwate prefecture, where he learned how to make shoji screens and doors. He was getting paid now and he dreamed of buying a bicycle, a radio or even a watch. ‘My parents told me there’s this girl. Why don’t you marry her?’ There were fewer ‘love matches’ in those days with many marriages cemented by go-betweens. Sato did as he was told. He moved with his new bride to the fishing town where her relatives went back eighteen generations. The name of the town was Ofunato.

  • • •

  The first time I met Sato was a week after the tsunami. I had spotted an old man in a white hard hat picking through the rubble of what was once his home. Unlike many of the buildings, which had crumpled into unrecognizable mounds, Sato’s house was just about standing. It had a roof and a frame, though no walls to speak of. Everything that had once been inside had been pushed outside by the force of the water. Even the tatami matting, almost the sacred essence of a Japanese home, was spewed all over the mud. A white sedan car sat in what must have been his living room. Or perhaps it was just outside. In the indescribable wreckage and detritus of Ofunato it was hard to tell.